The price of the game, is the price of the game regardless of how it's delivered to you. I know we have a dozen or more threads on the same issue over the last 5 or more years and there is no explanation except that that's the way it is.

I think if we knew first hand the work it takes to develop a first class game, it might explain a lot. When we pay for a game, we are paying for the work, artistic design, voice actors, hard work, frustration and heart and soul that go into making a game. As Ana says, the delivery method shouldn't make any difference. There are also costs associated with setting up a download site and a secure payment system for downloading games.

I know I'm learning a lot about all this after becoming part of Agustin Cordes' Kickstarter campaign for Asylum.

I would gladly pay more for a hard copy boxed game. It makes no sense to me to pay the same for a download. I started to buy a download recently and discovered I could get the same game at the same price in DVD case.

_________________________
Brick walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage. Give no thought of tomorrow, today was tomorrow and tomorrow will be today.

Most development houses run a website, contracting out the e-fulfilment side of a download store to a place like Steam, or Amazon, or other such credible stores can't be *that* hard that it wouldn't be preferable to dealing with conventional games publishers.

Many small bands do it for their music, no reason why developers couldn't do it too.

ETA: there's even a name for the process: "disintermediation" ... and the music publishers and games publishers (i.e. old-school sellers of plastic disks) hate it.

The price for Download and retail are the same, because the retailer want it.

the analysis below is true ONLY for PC, for Consoles, there are other specific surprises

Of course you could imagine that, as a customer, you have the right to pay only for what things worth, and of course it is not true... We are the consumer, the lower step on the food chain.

So to make a summary of the situation, the download version cost less, of course, there is not "cost of goods"(that is 0.5-1USD) that's the box the manual.There are no logistics (no truck to deliver boxes from warehouse to warehouse). the cost for delivery of games in term of bandwitdth is nothing, few cents for the people delivering you the game. the distribution cost retail vs web shop is something like 30-50% of the price on retail, less than 20 on digital, of course some portals take more, but they bring something more usually, or they sell so little that it doesn't worth the embarassment. In the end you could pay your Digital version 30% less than the retail. BUT the retail is blackmailing the publisher and say : if you put it at 19.99 in digital and 29.99 retail, we'll put it too at this price, otherwise all people will buy digital over retail, and retail will sell ONLY to the the people that REALLY want a box, not enough people to actually reference and carry a product.So if you want a box, and if publisher make boxes, they have to keep the price of the game more expensive for everyone. Of course many publishers are not interested into that, and stop to make boxes.

this is why, there will never be price differences for NEW games between digital and retail, after few weeks or months, you'll be able to observe divergence between retail and digital.

For downloads there is the matter of bandwith costs. All those downloads aren't cheap, especially when a lot of people try to download it at the same time. I loved the Pins and Needles special edition of Dark Fall I & II that Jonathan Boakes distributed himself. Jonathan's blog